Meaning in LFG

Abstract

This chapter discusses how meaning has been handled in Lexical-Functional Grammar. As well as giving a historical overview, it also argues that the modern approach, using Glue Semantics, has a number of undesirable properties: meanings do not figure at all in the architecture of the grammar, merely standing in an unspecified correspondence with semantic structures; s-structures themselves have become an enfeebled and unimportant part of the projection architecture; and meaning constructors, when written in the ‘new glue’ format, give the impression of being quite distinct from other kinds of functional annotation, making the semantic component seem out of sync with the rest of the formalism. To remedy these issues, Findlay suggests a mechanism for representing meanings explicitly in s-structures, and for integrating linear logic into the description language of LFG more generally. This has immediate benefits for the analysis of idioms and for the theory of the semantics-information structure interface.

Lexical Functional Grammar as a Construction Grammar

“…On the division of the string into the s-string and p-string, see Mycock 2011 andLowe 2013. The other structures shown here are p(rosodic)structure (Mycock and Lowe 2013), s(emantic)-structure (Dalrymple 1999;Lowe 2014;Findlay 2021), and i(nformation)-structure (Dalrymple and Nikolaeva 2011). Not shown are a(rgument)-structure, which appears between c-structure and f-structure in some conceptions of the architecture (Butt et al 1997), but which other approaches have omitted entirely (Asudeh and Giorgolo 2012;Findlay 2016); and m(orphosyntactic)-structure (Butt et al 1996;Frank and Zaenen 2004), which has likewise been dispensed with in modern treatments (Dalrymple 2015) [ 209 ] their own internal structure and formal representation" (Dalrymple et al 2019, 265 -although in practice almost all are represented as AVMs like f-structure), meaning that LFG takes a highly modular view of the grammar.…”

A Modular-Incremental Approach to Improving Compliance Verification With the Biological Weapons Convention

“…Each of the modular proposals are designed to operate independently and reinforce each other as they are adopted. 17 These proposals are intentionally designed to be modest and narrow in scope initially in order to achieve incremental progress in the face of difficult political and scientific realities. 10 As states parties become confident in a modest version of each adopted proposal, they can then incrementally expand the scope and authority of each or introduce more modules as they become viable.…”